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Magical mystery tour greyed out unexplained options
Wed, 01/31/2007 - 04:41 — admin
One thing that I see consistantely is applications that have options you can see but they are grey'ed out, early versions of nicotine suffered from this, ofcourse if you were 'in the know' you'de know that you missed a certain configuration parameter in your user preferences. KDE or gnome or any app for this matter suffers from this
The Gimp suffers from this extensively, heres an example of what I mean..
User-interfaces should be crafted in such a way that the user learns about what is going whilst they are using the application, there is already the logic inside of the program to enable/disable that menu item, all that needs doing is explaining to the user why that option cannot be enabled (Im presuming because the image I'm using is in index color mode not RGB? but who cares?)
I call this - the magical mystery greyed out option
I LIKE the grayed out
I LIKE the grayed out options. Seeing an options grayed out might be frustrating at times.
But nowhere NEAR as frustrating as looking for an option that isn't getting displayed. You end up looking everywhere 15 times over and spending hours looking for the damn option.
At least when you find it grayed you know you have to do something to enable it.
At least they spelled
At least they spelled colours correctly! That's not something you see everyday.
I thought the Linux apps I
I thought the Linux apps I used were mundane at best. So far, nobody has shown me any really cool, but still useful-to-the-ordinary-man apps that you can't already do and do better with Windows, often with software that's just as free.
In fact, Open Office (at least the Windows version) was pretty bad: you can't automate envelopes, document conversion from Word was poor, and it did not handle oversized documents nearly as well as Word '97 could. I was underwhelmed.
i agree, and theres been no
i agree, and theres been no change since the apps were first written
The Gimp and its related
The Gimp and its related friends, gimp2 and cinePaint are pretty much the worst painting packages ...ever.
They are all annoying to use, 'try hard' to do what photoshop has done for eons and the apps have personally lost my work due to technical problems on numerous occasions on professional projects.
Having greyed out menu items without explanation happens in a fair few apps, but at least I will never have to look at them because i will never open a paint package on Linux :/ ever again.